The software that comes with the card is rather light. Besides the drivers the CDs contains
WinDVD and demos of
Soldier of Fortune 2 and
Earthviewer 3D. I would’ve liked to see one full version of a game or two but at least you get a good DVD player. The picture is pretty solid and it outputted well on the TV. I did find a rather weird problem while outputting the DVD picture to the TV. I turned on hardware acceleration and I had picture after effects above and below the main picture where the black bars should be. For example, if I had a setup menu on top of the screen and I hid it, the areas of the menu that weren’t taken up by the DVD picture remained on screen. After turning off hardware acceleration, the problem went away. In any case, the picture quality was good whether acceleration was on or off and it was pretty smooth.
Speaking of TV out, the picture quality is also pretty good from the
GF4 MX-8X. Using the 40.72 drivers from NVIDIA, I installed the card in my
homemade PVR and tested the card. The black borders around the main screen remained at first but the drivers allowed me to expand the screen so the picture took up the entire TV whereas before I had to use a program called
TV TOOL to achieve the same effect. After some adjustments with the flicker filter, color, and brightness I had a pretty good picture quality to watch TV from my TV card.
Installation was painless as I plugged the card in and installed the latest reference drivers. For benchmarking, test setup consisted of:
Athlon XP 2200+
MSI KT3 Ultra2
2 sticks of Crucial 256 PC2100 DDR RAM
Western Digital 80GIG 7200RPM HD
Plextor 12x10x32 CD/RW
Hercules Game Theater XP
D-Link 10/100 Ethernet card
For the games and programs I chose:
3DMark SE – MadOnion
Quake 3 – iD Software
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Epic Games
Comanche 4 Demo – NovaLogic
All the tests were done with the 40.72 detonator drivers from NVIDIA’s website. V-sync was turned off. With all the tests I ran, the computer was pretty stable. I didn’t experience a crash at all with the three games and
3D Mark program.
Page 2 of 5
